Bookshelf: Visual Editions

Bookshelf this week is Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen of Visual Editions, they select five books from a publishing perspective and give an insight into their own book printing capers. They like to do things a little differently when it comes to their own works, for example a concrete reinterpretation of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, or the die-cut story Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer, literally carved out of another book. They set store by books that have worth as an object and enhance a text, and their picks this week reflect that very nicely…

“Before we talk through the books we hang onto in our studio, we wanted to tell you about the bookshelf we keep our books on. Because where we keep our books is just as important as where we read them and what they are. So our studio bookshelf is a palette bookshelf. It’s literally a few holes cut into a wooden palette, that the guys at Birch Studio made when they were still studying Typographics at LCC. They were going to chuck it out, we asked if we could have it and they were more than happy to hand it over. It’s probably the least space-efficient bookshelf we’ll ever have, but efficiency is over-rated anyway and we love it.”

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne

This book was first published in the late 18th century in nine volumes. It is arguably the first example of what we call “visual writing”. We think of visual writing as writing that uses visual devices in some way to help tell the story. The term is something we made up, but has a long, rich heritage and most probably starts with Shandy. Sterne used all sorts of devices like a black page to show a character’s death, squiggles to show sword movements, plenty of different length dashes and astericks to give the writing a dynamic flow and rythmn. This was the first book we published, beautifully designed and re-imagined by the talented women at A Practice for Everyday Life and introduced by Will Self. Here are just a few of the many older editions of the book, all of which had lost their lustre along the way.www.laurencesternetrust.org.ukwww.amazon.co.uk/tristram_shandy…

Radioactive and Century Girl Lauren Redniss

Jonathan Safran Foer told us about Lauren Redniss and her work and we’ve had a major crush on her ever since. Redniss is an image-maker and writer based in New York. When she’s not teaching at Parson’s, she’s delving deeply into extraordinary women’s lives and histories. Researching them extensively and visually writing their stories. The stories are very much factually driven, but the way they are written is light, almost whimsical and illustrated in a way that makes it impossible to disentangle the writing from the illustrations. Radioactive is Redniss’s latest book, about Marie Curie, and even has a glow in the dark cover. How cool is that?www.laurenredniss.comwww.amazon.co.uk/radioactive…

Index Book Andy Warhol

This book, which is so rare and hard to come by these days, we feel super lucky to have been loaned a copy, was first published in 1967. It opens with a quote that sets the tone for the book perfectly: “Well, Andy loves mistakes, this wasn’t rehearsed.” The book, called a “children’s book for hipsters”, is full of pop-ups, pull-outs, fold-outs and even a baloon (though that’s missing from our copy). It’s a source of inspiration for us: seeing different fun ways that paper and books can still be pushed and experienced.www.warholstars.org/chron/1967…

Woman’s World Graham Rawle

Here is a book that looks like a ransom note. The only thing is it’s a book, not a note. Rawle “wrote” the whole of Woman’s World by using text he had cut out from 1950s women’s magazines. Even the page numbers are cut out. It’s not the easiest book to read, but we admire the skill, craft and patience it must have taken to write and design a book like this. We’ve heard it’s also being made into a film, we just hope they stay faithful to the book’s original vision.www.grahamrawle.comwww.amazon.co.uk/womans_world…

Politics Adam Thirlwell

We’re cheating a little bit here, because our copy of this book isn’t actually on our studio bookshelf, though a well worn copy is at home and we’re in early talks with Adam about doing a book together, so we couldn’t resist including it here. Politics is Thirlwell’s first novel which came out in 2003. As the BBC said at the time, it’s actually not really about Politics at all, but about all sex. Which is true. It’s a funny book that’s written with so much energy and guts and the first time that Adam started to use what we endearingly call his “Ferris Bueller” moments. Skillfull moments when the narrator suddenly “turns” to the reader and talks to him/her in the same way that Ferris Bueller turned to the camera. Jolts you out of your seat in the very best way. Oh and the sex ain’t too bad either.www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/adam-thirwell…www.amazon.co.uk/politics…

We’ve been extolling the virtues of graphic designer Sean Freeman since way back in 2008 when some of you were likely still in short trousers and I was at university saying pretentious things about poems I’d half-cribbed from York Notes. In all that time our love for his work hasn’t faded, and while seven years ago we were content to devote just 11 words to Sean, today we’ll dedicate a few more to him to bring you some great recent work.

“It’s a funny thing actually,” Tony Brook tells me, pointing to a series of three posters which have been reprinted especially for design studio Spin’s new exhibition, which opens today. “I was saying this morning to the guys who were putting the show up, when we first made those posters they all just went. 125, bang! Immediately! And we thought that was what would happen every time, because we’d never made anything before. We were disabused of that illusion fairly quickly.”

Spanish studio Clase bcn was tasked with creating the promotional material for The Palau de la Música Catalana’s 2015-2016 season and the result is a playful but refined identity. Encompassing the building’s grandeur, huge banners line the corridors of the concert hall, showcasing the events and people appearing at the Palau, tying them together with a border of lush colours to echo the hall’s eclectic programme. Made up of fragmented shapes the boarder has been translated wonderfully into the other areas of the identity, appearing in milky-coloured pamphlets and a sturdy book.

Annual reports aren’t the most exciting sounding of entities, but in the right hands, they can certainly become beautiful. Take Manchester agency Music’s designs for the British Fashion Council’s 2014/15 annual review. With an all-black cover, gorgeous imagery and bold typography, you’d do well to tell it apart from a slick coffee table tome. The book showcases the BFC’s “five strategic pillars”, according to Music; Business, Education, Innovation & Digital, Investment and Reputation, with imagery from events including London Fashion Week, the British Fashion Awards and London Collections Men.

It goes without saying that we receive more information from screens than we do from paper. But posters are such a superb platform for graphic design experimentation that they seem unlikely to become obsolete. Instead, they’re adapting, and a wonderful example of that shapeshifting is in the smart moving posters of agency Wonder Room. The man behind them is Steve Hockett, who made them in response to seeing his poster designs diluted for online platforms.

You know what we’re like, always going all gaga over pretty colours and GIFS like little typing magpies. But we’re not all about a pretty picture over here at It’s Nice That; and neither is designer Evan Grothjan. While we admit we were initially drawn in by his vivid tones and abstract compositions, it turns out there’s a lot more to his Spaces series than crowd-pleasing aesthetics. Instead, the images form an ongoing investigation into the relationship between space and emotion; something Evan’s been interested in since studying animation as part of his Rhode Island School of Design course.